Archive for March, 2013

Pay is being slashed, workloads increased, resources withdrawn and thousands are losing their jobs. No wonder morale is at rock bottom. John Harris joins officers on the streets of Bristol

It’s early Saturday evening in Bristol. In one of those vehicles that looks like a reinforced minibus, a two-person police response team is doing the rounds of the suburbs to the city’s north-east. PC Beth Hawke and PC Dan Heyward see themselves as police “activists”. By which they mean, as Hawke puts it: “We like to go out, and we like to nick people.”

But Hawke’s clear-cut view of what working a beat should be like is coming under threat. Earlier this month, the Police Federation – which represents 124,000 officers – announced the results of a ballot on whether it should push for police to have “industrial rights”: in plain terms, the ability to strike. Many more officers voted in favour than against (45,631 to 10,681), but because turnout was lower than 50%, there was no official mandate. For the federation, however, the result offered concrete proof of its members’ anxiety about budget cuts, changes to officers’ terms and conditions and the dire state of morale.

As Steve Williams, chair of the federation, sees it, the fact that around a third of Britain’s police voted in favour of industrial rights shows they are “very angry and disappointed … people are being overstretched, and the perception of attacks on their pay and conditions is grinding them down”. Indeed, last month a survey of 1,400 officers from the Avon and Somerset force revealed that 95% have no confidence in government plans for the police, which suggests that most of them may be not only stressed, but quietly seething. Just over half said they “would consider looking for alternative employment”.

I am shadowing Hawke and Heyward a week before the result of the ballot. Given that the Avon and Somerset constabulary’s press office has prohibited them from talking about budget cuts and morale, there is something of an elephant in the back of the van.

Hawke is 25 and from Bridgend, South Wales. She used to play women’s rugby for her home country, and uses impeccable cop-speak to tell me that the changes to police conditions and pensions “are of some concern”. But she insists she loves her job. She has recently applied to work in something called the operations unit, where she would specialise in underwater searches and “dirty body removal”. She explains the latter thus: “You deal with bodies that have been there for anything longer than a week, really, and they are in the process of decomposition.”

When asked about the most dangerous aspects of their jobs, neither constable misses a beat. “You can be searching somebody who has HIV/Aids, or hepatitis,” says Hawke. “You’ll empty a rucksack and it’ll be full of uncapped needles. That, for me, is the biggest fear: a fear of infection. And we regularly come across people with weapons: anything from, like, hammers, knives …”

“I had a meat cleaver come through a door at me once,” says Heyward, aged 36. “I was knocking on a door. I could hear something behind it – and the next thing, the blade actually came through the door. We backed off: we called for our armed response unit.”

Nothing nearly so dramatic happens tonight, though it has its moments. At around 6.30pm the two officers are called to a flat above a shopping parade in the Henbury area. An ambulance is on the scene, because the man recorded as living there has been making 999 calls, which have suggested some kind of breathing problem. Peering through the letterbox, all anyone can see is an enveloping darkness and the flickering light from a TV.

Eventually, Hawke and Heyward decide they have no option but to break down the door – whereupon they discover an emaciated man, surrounded by at least 20 cans of beer and empty bottles of whisky, apparently oblivious to the fact that most of his electricity has short-circuited, and the flat is freezing. In the kitchen, there is a smattering of rotting food. It transpires that he has been released from prison after serving time for drink-driving, and shows all the signs of being not just malnourished, but having mental-health issues.

This grim scene highlights one aspect of the police’s current predicament: as social services budgets are slashed, it is ordinary officers who find themselves clearing up the mess. “We’ve seen a massive shift in the last 12 months,” says Hawke, “especially in relation to mental health.” She reckons that law-breaking now accounts for no more than 20% of her work.

These are turbulent times for ordinary police officers. Like so many public sector workers, they are in the midst of a two–year pay freeze and facing increased pension contributions. By 2015, the Home Office hopes to have cut its grants to police forces by around 23%, meaning that the organisation of many constabularies is in flux; numbers of officers and civilian staff are tumbling.

At the same time, the government is in the midst of radical reforms to policing in England and Wales. In the autumn of 2010, the home secretary Theresa May announced a comprehensive review of officers’ terms and conditions, to be overseen by Tom Winsor, the lawyer who spent five years as the chief rail regulator. He reported back in two stages: “Winsor I”, focusing on short-term alterations, appeared in April 2011, and “Winsor II”, a package of more thoroughgoing changes, followed a year later. At which point, it all went off, with the Police Federation claiming the proposals threatened to “undermine the very foundations of British policing and the public we serve”.

Winsor has since been appointed to the role of HM chief inspector of constabulary, and most of his key reforms are on the way. The starting salary for a police officer will soon be cut by £4,000 to £19,000, though recruits with some experience of policing – such as community support officers – will initially earn around £22,000. (To put this in perspective, McDonald’s pays its trainee managers between £18,500 and £21,500.) The “competence-related threshold payment”, whereby most officers earn an extra £1200 a year, is for the chop. Higher ranks will be opened up to outside candidates – meaning that some senior officers will never have been on the beat. There are also plans for “compulsory severance”, for the first time giving chief constables the power to sack officers – something currently being negotiated via the Police Arbitration Tribunal, and due to be confirmed by July. For the Police Federation, this issue threatens to turn constables into mere employees, imperilling the principle that – to quote the renowned judge Lord Denning – they are “answerable to the law and to the law alone”.

These are not the only elements of May’s reform drive. English and Welsh police forces are now overseen by 41 elected police and crime commissioners. Last month, partly in response to belated revelations about the Hillsborough disaster, the home secretary announced a new regime to safeguard police integrity, built around an official code of ethics and an expanded and strengthened Independent Police Complaints Commission. Meanwhile, some constabularies have been trying to cut costs by outsourcing elements of police work to private companies.

Those pushing for reform are fond of quoting a particularly sobering statistic: in the 18 months to December 2012, seven of England’s chief constables were either forced to resign, suspended, sacked for misconduct or placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation. Amid all the noise about the future of the police, one thing is obvious: the view of the force as “the last great unreformed public service”, first suggested by David Cameron back in 2006, has become common media currency.

Dry numbers, though, tell you less about the state of things than conversations with serving officers. Hacking down the starting salary, many claim, will deter those who become police officers in second careers, depriving the service of people with valuable life experience. “I wouldn’t join on £19,000,” one officer says. “I couldn’t. If you’ve got a family, there’s no way. It just prices people out.”

Avon and Somerset’s deputy chief constable, Rob Beckley, is sanguine about the cuts, the state of morale, and most of the Winsor reforms – but on this point, his judgment is clear: “What worries me is that we have, in latter years, recruited people with great life experience from other professions. They often take jobs in the police in their 30s and 40s, and they add an awful lot of value.” If starting salaries are too low, he says, “you simply won’t get people in”. And does he think that’s a danger? “Yes. Yes I do.”

On condition of anonymity, one constable with 16 years’ service in the Midlands, admits that morale is “really dire”. He voted “yes” in the industrial-rights ballot, not because he wishes to strike, but “to show my feelings, that enough is enough”.

“It feels like we’re constantly under attack from the government,” he says. His force has just emerged from a long and morale-sapping recruitment and promotion freeze. Police buildings have been sold off, and the vehicle fleet has been cut: 999 response teams have been taken out of local police stations and squeezed into a central “hub” – which saves money, but means they lack local knowledge.

The Winsor reforms, he reckons, are ”all about saving money – it’s got nothing to do with improving skills or professionalism. It just seems to be about making us work like robots, for less money.” And they are playing their part in what he claims is a huge sapping of officers’ energy and goodwill: “What you’re getting now is officers who are just thinking, ‘Stuff this – I’m just going to treat this as a job’,” he says. “It’s, ‘I’m going to turn up, do what I’ve got to do to keep people off my back, and go home. Why should I put myself out?’”

At the Home Office, the response to all this is terse. “Our reforms are working and crime is falling. Policing continues to be a well-paid career that recognises the important job officers do and rewards their hard work and dedication.” May’s changes, the statement continues, “add up to the most radical overhaul to policing pay and conditions for 30 years”, built on the idea that “we need to bring management practices into line with those elsewhere in the public sector and the wider economy”.

The second half of my night in Bristol takes me to the city centre, in the company of three officers playing their part in a weekly ritual called Operation Brio. It begins with a briefing session involving 35 policemen and women and a run-down of likely trouble, all of which inevitably revolves around drink, and city-centre pubs, bars and clubs, which attract around 35,000 people on a Saturday night.

The next three hours start slowly, but they soon fall into a pattern. By 12.30am, the blue light atop the van is regularly flashing. Everything passes in a blur of petty violence, vomit and 60mph sprints to yet another incident. One rampaging twentysomething man throws another into a road chock-a-block with cars and taxis, and out come the handcuffs – only for it to be revealed that they are brothers-in-law. A hapless youth has been brutally punched and bloodied by a man who has been refused entry to a club, but seems much less concerned with what might have happened than the fact that he has mislaid his phone. Each flashpoint has its own cast: perpetrator, victim, well-meaning friends and rubbernecking passers-by, all of them drunk.

In the van is 35-year-old Sgt Caroline Froud, who has been a police officer for 14 years. Does she feel she is working even harder these days? “I would say so, yes,” she says. She mentions the pressures on Avon and Somerset police that came from last year’s Olympics, but also the reductions in police budgets, and how they have affected the team in which she works. “It’s the numbers game. Up until April last year, we were two separate police stations and we both had an inspector, and each team had two sergeants. That’s two inspectors and four sergeants, and there were a higher number of PCs. Now, we’ve lost an inspector, and a sergeant and a couple of other officers.” She looks around to check that she hasn’t said anything that will get her into trouble. The blue light flashes again, and off we go – into the wee hours, and more trouble.

Pay is being slashed, workloads increased, resources withdrawn and thousands are losing their jobs. No wonder morale is at rock bottom. John Harris joins officers on the streets of Bristol

It’s early Saturday evening in Bristol. In one of those vehicles that looks like a reinforced minibus, a two-person police response team is doing the rounds of the suburbs to the city’s north-east. PC Beth Hawke and PC Dan Heyward see themselves as police “activists”. By which they mean, as Hawke puts it: “We like to go out, and we like to nick people.”

But Hawke’s clear-cut view of what working a beat should be like is coming under threat. Earlier this month, the Police Federation – which represents 124,000 officers – announced the results of a ballot on whether it should push for police to have “industrial rights”: in plain terms, the ability to strike. Many more officers voted in favour than against (45,631 to 10,681), but because turnout was lower than 50%, there was no official mandate. For the federation, however, the result offered concrete proof of its members’ anxiety about budget cuts, changes to officers’ terms and conditions and the dire state of morale.

As Steve Williams, chair of the federation, sees it, the fact that around a third of Britain’s police voted in favour of industrial rights shows they are “very angry and disappointed … people are being overstretched, and the perception of attacks on their pay and conditions is grinding them down”. Indeed, last month a survey of 1,400 officers from the Avon and Somerset force revealed that 95% have no confidence in government plans for the police, which suggests that most of them may be not only stressed, but quietly seething. Just over half said they “would consider looking for alternative employment”.

I am shadowing Hawke and Heyward a week before the result of the ballot. Given that the Avon and Somerset constabulary’s press office has prohibited them from talking about budget cuts and morale, there is something of an elephant in the back of the van.

Hawke is 25 and from Bridgend, South Wales. She used to play women’s rugby for her home country, and uses impeccable cop-speak to tell me that the changes to police conditions and pensions “are of some concern”. But she insists she loves her job. She has recently applied to work in something called the operations unit, where she would specialise in underwater searches and “dirty body removal”. She explains the latter thus: “You deal with bodies that have been there for anything longer than a week, really, and they are in the process of decomposition.”

When asked about the most dangerous aspects of their jobs, neither constable misses a beat. “You can be searching somebody who has HIV/Aids, or hepatitis,” says Hawke. “You’ll empty a rucksack and it’ll be full of uncapped needles. That, for me, is the biggest fear: a fear of infection. And we regularly come across people with weapons: anything from, like, hammers, knives …”

“I had a meat cleaver come through a door at me once,” says Heyward, aged 36. “I was knocking on a door. I could hear something behind it – and the next thing, the blade actually came through the door. We backed off: we called for our armed response unit.”

Nothing nearly so dramatic happens tonight, though it has its moments. At around 6.30pm the two officers are called to a flat above a shopping parade in the Henbury area. An ambulance is on the scene, because the man recorded as living there has been making 999 calls, which have suggested some kind of breathing problem. Peering through the letterbox, all anyone can see is an enveloping darkness and the flickering light from a TV.

Eventually, Hawke and Heyward decide they have no option but to break down the door – whereupon they discover an emaciated man, surrounded by at least 20 cans of beer and empty bottles of whisky, apparently oblivious to the fact that most of his electricity has short-circuited, and the flat is freezing. In the kitchen, there is a smattering of rotting food. It transpires that he has been released from prison after serving time for drink-driving, and shows all the signs of being not just malnourished, but having mental-health issues.

This grim scene highlights one aspect of the police’s current predicament: as social services budgets are slashed, it is ordinary officers who find themselves clearing up the mess. “We’ve seen a massive shift in the last 12 months,” says Hawke, “especially in relation to mental health.” She reckons that law-breaking now accounts for no more than 20% of her work.

These are turbulent times for ordinary police officers. Like so many public sector workers, they are in the midst of a two–year pay freeze and facing increased pension contributions. By 2015, the Home Office hopes to have cut its grants to police forces by around 23%, meaning that the organisation of many constabularies is in flux; numbers of officers and civilian staff are tumbling.

At the same time, the government is in the midst of radical reforms to policing in England and Wales. In the autumn of 2010, the home secretary Theresa May announced a comprehensive review of officers’ terms and conditions, to be overseen by Tom Winsor, the lawyer who spent five years as the chief rail regulator. He reported back in two stages: “Winsor I”, focusing on short-term alterations, appeared in April 2011, and “Winsor II”, a package of more thoroughgoing changes, followed a year later. At which point, it all went off, with the Police Federation claiming the proposals threatened to “undermine the very foundations of British policing and the public we serve”.

Winsor has since been appointed to the role of HM chief inspector of constabulary, and most of his key reforms are on the way. The starting salary for a police officer will soon be cut by £4,000 to £19,000, though recruits with some experience of policing – such as community support officers – will initially earn around £22,000. (To put this in perspective, McDonald’s pays its trainee managers between £18,500 and £21,500.) The “competence-related threshold payment”, whereby most officers earn an extra £1200 a year, is for the chop. Higher ranks will be opened up to outside candidates – meaning that some senior officers will never have been on the beat. There are also plans for “compulsory severance”, for the first time giving chief constables the power to sack officers – something currently being negotiated via the Police Arbitration Tribunal, and due to be confirmed by July. For the Police Federation, this issue threatens to turn constables into mere employees, imperilling the principle that – to quote the renowned judge Lord Denning – they are “answerable to the law and to the law alone”.

These are not the only elements of May’s reform drive. English and Welsh police forces are now overseen by 41 elected police and crime commissioners. Last month, partly in response to belated revelations about the Hillsborough disaster, the home secretary announced a new regime to safeguard police integrity, built around an official code of ethics and an expanded and strengthened Independent Police Complaints Commission. Meanwhile, some constabularies have been trying to cut costs by outsourcing elements of police work to private companies.

Those pushing for reform are fond of quoting a particularly sobering statistic: in the 18 months to December 2012, seven of England’s chief constables were either forced to resign, suspended, sacked for misconduct or placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation. Amid all the noise about the future of the police, one thing is obvious: the view of the force as “the last great unreformed public service”, first suggested by David Cameron back in 2006, has become common media currency.

Dry numbers, though, tell you less about the state of things than conversations with serving officers. Hacking down the starting salary, many claim, will deter those who become police officers in second careers, depriving the service of people with valuable life experience. “I wouldn’t join on £19,000,” one officer says. “I couldn’t. If you’ve got a family, there’s no way. It just prices people out.”

Avon and Somerset’s deputy chief constable, Rob Beckley, is sanguine about the cuts, the state of morale, and most of the Winsor reforms – but on this point, his judgment is clear: “What worries me is that we have, in latter years, recruited people with great life experience from other professions. They often take jobs in the police in their 30s and 40s, and they add an awful lot of value.” If starting salaries are too low, he says, “you simply won’t get people in”. And does he think that’s a danger? “Yes. Yes I do.”

On condition of anonymity, one constable with 16 years’ service in the Midlands, admits that morale is “really dire”. He voted “yes” in the industrial-rights ballot, not because he wishes to strike, but “to show my feelings, that enough is enough”.

“It feels like we’re constantly under attack from the government,” he says. His force has just emerged from a long and morale-sapping recruitment and promotion freeze. Police buildings have been sold off, and the vehicle fleet has been cut: 999 response teams have been taken out of local police stations and squeezed into a central “hub” – which saves money, but means they lack local knowledge.

The Winsor reforms, he reckons, are ”all about saving money – it’s got nothing to do with improving skills or professionalism. It just seems to be about making us work like robots, for less money.” And they are playing their part in what he claims is a huge sapping of officers’ energy and goodwill: “What you’re getting now is officers who are just thinking, ‘Stuff this – I’m just going to treat this as a job’,” he says. “It’s, ‘I’m going to turn up, do what I’ve got to do to keep people off my back, and go home. Why should I put myself out?’”

At the Home Office, the response to all this is terse. “Our reforms are working and crime is falling. Policing continues to be a well-paid career that recognises the important job officers do and rewards their hard work and dedication.” May’s changes, the statement continues, “add up to the most radical overhaul to policing pay and conditions for 30 years”, built on the idea that “we need to bring management practices into line with those elsewhere in the public sector and the wider economy”.

The second half of my night in Bristol takes me to the city centre, in the company of three officers playing their part in a weekly ritual called Operation Brio. It begins with a briefing session involving 35 policemen and women and a run-down of likely trouble, all of which inevitably revolves around drink, and city-centre pubs, bars and clubs, which attract around 35,000 people on a Saturday night.

The next three hours start slowly, but they soon fall into a pattern. By 12.30am, the blue light atop the van is regularly flashing. Everything passes in a blur of petty violence, vomit and 60mph sprints to yet another incident. One rampaging twentysomething man throws another into a road chock-a-block with cars and taxis, and out come the handcuffs – only for it to be revealed that they are brothers-in-law. A hapless youth has been brutally punched and bloodied by a man who has been refused entry to a club, but seems much less concerned with what might have happened than the fact that he has mislaid his phone. Each flashpoint has its own cast: perpetrator, victim, well-meaning friends and rubbernecking passers-by, all of them drunk.

In the van is 35-year-old Sgt Caroline Froud, who has been a police officer for 14 years. Does she feel she is working even harder these days? “I would say so, yes,” she says. She mentions the pressures on Avon and Somerset police that came from last year’s Olympics, but also the reductions in police budgets, and how they have affected the team in which she works. “It’s the numbers game. Up until April last year, we were two separate police stations and we both had an inspector, and each team had two sergeants. That’s two inspectors and four sergeants, and there were a higher number of PCs. Now, we’ve lost an inspector, and a sergeant and a couple of other officers.” She looks around to check that she hasn’t said anything that will get her into trouble. The blue light flashes again, and off we go – into the wee hours, and more trouble.

Pay is being slashed, workloads increased, resources withdrawn and thousands are losing their jobs. No wonder morale is at rock bottom. John Harris joins officers on the streets of Bristol

It’s early Saturday evening in Bristol. In one of those vehicles that looks like a reinforced minibus, a two-person police response team is doing the rounds of the suburbs to the city’s north-east. PC Beth Hawke and PC Dan Heyward see themselves as police “activists”. By which they mean, as Hawke puts it: “We like to go out, and we like to nick people.”

But Hawke’s clear-cut view of what working a beat should be like is coming under threat. Earlier this month, the Police Federation – which represents 124,000 officers – announced the results of a ballot on whether it should push for police to have “industrial rights”: in plain terms, the ability to strike. Many more officers voted in favour than against (45,631 to 10,681), but because turnout was lower than 50%, there was no official mandate. For the federation, however, the result offered concrete proof of its members’ anxiety about budget cuts, changes to officers’ terms and conditions and the dire state of morale.

As Steve Williams, chair of the federation, sees it, the fact that around a third of Britain’s police voted in favour of industrial rights shows they are “very angry and disappointed … people are being overstretched, and the perception of attacks on their pay and conditions is grinding them down”. Indeed, last month a survey of 1,400 officers from the Avon and Somerset force revealed that 95% have no confidence in government plans for the police, which suggests that most of them may be not only stressed, but quietly seething. Just over half said they “would consider looking for alternative employment”.

I am shadowing Hawke and Heyward a week before the result of the ballot. Given that the Avon and Somerset constabulary’s press office has prohibited them from talking about budget cuts and morale, there is something of an elephant in the back of the van.

Hawke is 25 and from Bridgend, South Wales. She used to play women’s rugby for her home country, and uses impeccable cop-speak to tell me that the changes to police conditions and pensions “are of some concern”. But she insists she loves her job. She has recently applied to work in something called the operations unit, where she would specialise in underwater searches and “dirty body removal”. She explains the latter thus: “You deal with bodies that have been there for anything longer than a week, really, and they are in the process of decomposition.”

When asked about the most dangerous aspects of their jobs, neither constable misses a beat. “You can be searching somebody who has HIV/Aids, or hepatitis,” says Hawke. “You’ll empty a rucksack and it’ll be full of uncapped needles. That, for me, is the biggest fear: a fear of infection. And we regularly come across people with weapons: anything from, like, hammers, knives …”

“I had a meat cleaver come through a door at me once,” says Heyward, aged 36. “I was knocking on a door. I could hear something behind it – and the next thing, the blade actually came through the door. We backed off: we called for our armed response unit.”

Nothing nearly so dramatic happens tonight, though it has its moments. At around 6.30pm the two officers are called to a flat above a shopping parade in the Henbury area. An ambulance is on the scene, because the man recorded as living there has been making 999 calls, which have suggested some kind of breathing problem. Peering through the letterbox, all anyone can see is an enveloping darkness and the flickering light from a TV.

Eventually, Hawke and Heyward decide they have no option but to break down the door – whereupon they discover an emaciated man, surrounded by at least 20 cans of beer and empty bottles of whisky, apparently oblivious to the fact that most of his electricity has short-circuited, and the flat is freezing. In the kitchen, there is a smattering of rotting food. It transpires that he has been released from prison after serving time for drink-driving, and shows all the signs of being not just malnourished, but having mental-health issues.

This grim scene highlights one aspect of the police’s current predicament: as social services budgets are slashed, it is ordinary officers who find themselves clearing up the mess. “We’ve seen a massive shift in the last 12 months,” says Hawke, “especially in relation to mental health.” She reckons that law-breaking now accounts for no more than 20% of her work.

These are turbulent times for ordinary police officers. Like so many public sector workers, they are in the midst of a two–year pay freeze and facing increased pension contributions. By 2015, the Home Office hopes to have cut its grants to police forces by around 23%, meaning that the organisation of many constabularies is in flux; numbers of officers and civilian staff are tumbling.

At the same time, the government is in the midst of radical reforms to policing in England and Wales. In the autumn of 2010, the home secretary Theresa May announced a comprehensive review of officers’ terms and conditions, to be overseen by Tom Winsor, the lawyer who spent five years as the chief rail regulator. He reported back in two stages: “Winsor I”, focusing on short-term alterations, appeared in April 2011, and “Winsor II”, a package of more thoroughgoing changes, followed a year later. At which point, it all went off, with the Police Federation claiming the proposals threatened to “undermine the very foundations of British policing and the public we serve”.

Winsor has since been appointed to the role of HM chief inspector of constabulary, and most of his key reforms are on the way. The starting salary for a police officer will soon be cut by £4,000 to £19,000, though recruits with some experience of policing – such as community support officers – will initially earn around £22,000. (To put this in perspective, McDonald’s pays its trainee managers between £18,500 and £21,500.) The “competence-related threshold payment”, whereby most officers earn an extra £1200 a year, is for the chop. Higher ranks will be opened up to outside candidates – meaning that some senior officers will never have been on the beat. There are also plans for “compulsory severance”, for the first time giving chief constables the power to sack officers – something currently being negotiated via the Police Arbitration Tribunal, and due to be confirmed by July. For the Police Federation, this issue threatens to turn constables into mere employees, imperilling the principle that – to quote the renowned judge Lord Denning – they are “answerable to the law and to the law alone”.

These are not the only elements of May’s reform drive. English and Welsh police forces are now overseen by 41 elected police and crime commissioners. Last month, partly in response to belated revelations about the Hillsborough disaster, the home secretary announced a new regime to safeguard police integrity, built around an official code of ethics and an expanded and strengthened Independent Police Complaints Commission. Meanwhile, some constabularies have been trying to cut costs by outsourcing elements of police work to private companies.

Those pushing for reform are fond of quoting a particularly sobering statistic: in the 18 months to December 2012, seven of England’s chief constables were either forced to resign, suspended, sacked for misconduct or placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation. Amid all the noise about the future of the police, one thing is obvious: the view of the force as “the last great unreformed public service”, first suggested by David Cameron back in 2006, has become common media currency.

Dry numbers, though, tell you less about the state of things than conversations with serving officers. Hacking down the starting salary, many claim, will deter those who become police officers in second careers, depriving the service of people with valuable life experience. “I wouldn’t join on £19,000,” one officer says. “I couldn’t. If you’ve got a family, there’s no way. It just prices people out.”

Avon and Somerset’s deputy chief constable, Rob Beckley, is sanguine about the cuts, the state of morale, and most of the Winsor reforms – but on this point, his judgment is clear: “What worries me is that we have, in latter years, recruited people with great life experience from other professions. They often take jobs in the police in their 30s and 40s, and they add an awful lot of value.” If starting salaries are too low, he says, “you simply won’t get people in”. And does he think that’s a danger? “Yes. Yes I do.”

On condition of anonymity, one constable with 16 years’ service in the Midlands, admits that morale is “really dire”. He voted “yes” in the industrial-rights ballot, not because he wishes to strike, but “to show my feelings, that enough is enough”.

“It feels like we’re constantly under attack from the government,” he says. His force has just emerged from a long and morale-sapping recruitment and promotion freeze. Police buildings have been sold off, and the vehicle fleet has been cut: 999 response teams have been taken out of local police stations and squeezed into a central “hub” – which saves money, but means they lack local knowledge.

The Winsor reforms, he reckons, are ”all about saving money – it’s got nothing to do with improving skills or professionalism. It just seems to be about making us work like robots, for less money.” And they are playing their part in what he claims is a huge sapping of officers’ energy and goodwill: “What you’re getting now is officers who are just thinking, ‘Stuff this – I’m just going to treat this as a job’,” he says. “It’s, ‘I’m going to turn up, do what I’ve got to do to keep people off my back, and go home. Why should I put myself out?’”

At the Home Office, the response to all this is terse. “Our reforms are working and crime is falling. Policing continues to be a well-paid career that recognises the important job officers do and rewards their hard work and dedication.” May’s changes, the statement continues, “add up to the most radical overhaul to policing pay and conditions for 30 years”, built on the idea that “we need to bring management practices into line with those elsewhere in the public sector and the wider economy”.

The second half of my night in Bristol takes me to the city centre, in the company of three officers playing their part in a weekly ritual called Operation Brio. It begins with a briefing session involving 35 policemen and women and a run-down of likely trouble, all of which inevitably revolves around drink, and city-centre pubs, bars and clubs, which attract around 35,000 people on a Saturday night.

The next three hours start slowly, but they soon fall into a pattern. By 12.30am, the blue light atop the van is regularly flashing. Everything passes in a blur of petty violence, vomit and 60mph sprints to yet another incident. One rampaging twentysomething man throws another into a road chock-a-block with cars and taxis, and out come the handcuffs – only for it to be revealed that they are brothers-in-law. A hapless youth has been brutally punched and bloodied by a man who has been refused entry to a club, but seems much less concerned with what might have happened than the fact that he has mislaid his phone. Each flashpoint has its own cast: perpetrator, victim, well-meaning friends and rubbernecking passers-by, all of them drunk.

In the van is 35-year-old Sgt Caroline Froud, who has been a police officer for 14 years. Does she feel she is working even harder these days? “I would say so, yes,” she says. She mentions the pressures on Avon and Somerset police that came from last year’s Olympics, but also the reductions in police budgets, and how they have affected the team in which she works. “It’s the numbers game. Up until April last year, we were two separate police stations and we both had an inspector, and each team had two sergeants. That’s two inspectors and four sergeants, and there were a higher number of PCs. Now, we’ve lost an inspector, and a sergeant and a couple of other officers.” She looks around to check that she hasn’t said anything that will get her into trouble. The blue light flashes again, and off we go – into the wee hours, and more trouble.

From agitpop to love songs, Bragg has brought his audience through life with him, creating a soundtrack to thousands of lives

Billy Bragg has a new beard, a mixture of grey and what he calls “sandy coloured: a bit grey, and a bit red”. When he grew it, he says, “everyone said it suited me”. It also chimes with an element of his past. “When I was forging my career as a solo artist, I dyed my hair blond, so I when I looked in the mirror in the morning, I looked like someone else. And I felt like somebody else. It didn’t last, and I don’t expect the beard will last forever. But again, I feel like I’ve passed through a change.”

His new album is titled Tooth & Nail, and it has its own strapline, taken from a tweet by a fan who listened to his music while recovering from a broken relationship. She called him “The Sherpa of Heartbreak”.

“It reminded me that I write love songs, and I shouldn’t make any bones about it,” he explains, down a phone line from a tour stop-off in Mesa, Arizona. “When I was thinking about making this album, the songs I had were predominantly more personal.

“And rather than think: ‘I’d better write some political songs to balance it up’, I followed that instinct.”

In terms of its pre-eminent place in his recorded work, the subject of love is arguably Bragg’s true metier. His media caricature is that of the ultimate “leftwing singer-songwriter”, forever penning protest music. But it is his love songs that have most endured and which arguably give the truest picture of the man: a 55-year-old native of Barking, on the Essex/London borders, whose biography includes no end of stuff that sets him apart from the rock herd – not least, a brief spell in the army – and whose music always returns to the elemental stuff of human relationships.

He has long had a talent for lovelorn melancholy, heard in such songs as St Swithin’s Day (1984), which has the distinction of containing what is probably the rock canon’s only poetic reference to masturbation: “With my own hands/ When I make love to your memory.”

His new album is smattered with lyrics that unpick the more complex, ambivalent aspects of love: a glimpse of remorse and the pain of absence in a song called Swallow My Pride, and Chasing Rainbows, a wearied admission of the inevitability of tension and discord in even the most solid pairings. And his lyrics have also examined aspects of life that too many songwriters leave untouched: the almost impossibly moving Tank Park Salute (1991) is an evocation of bereavement based on the death of his father when Bragg was 18.

The ex-Smiths guitarist and songwriter Johnny Marr first met Bragg in the early 1980s, when the latter was becoming a byword for the politicised music briefly known as “agit-pop”.

“His agenda and his music, like a lot of great people, seemed to be all in the same package,” says Marr. “You got that straight away. But it was only when I started to hear him play a full set that I discovered all the romanticism in his writing, and that he wrote great love songs too. I’d just assumed everything was political. But he wrote a lot about falling in love: he’d obviously fallen in love a few times, and it had hit him hard.”

By way of a reference point, Marr mentions Tamla Motown icon Smokey Robinson, whose music Bragg adores. “It’s a funny one with Billy,” he goes on. “He’s such a masculine guy, but he’s able to tap into a lovely poignancy and vulnerability – which I’ve got to see over the years, being his friend.”

For comedian and radio voice Phill Jupitus, things worked the other way round. Having grown up in Essex, he first fell for Bragg’s love songs, and felt their impact all the more because of the author’s familiar vowel sounds. “The soul singers – Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding – sing about pain and suffering,” he says. And you understand the words they’re expressing it with. But this was an accent from 15 miles down the road, which really spoke to me.

“What actually surprised me was the politics. During the miners’ strike, seeing him speak to people … when he spoke to a room in such a clear and defined way, it was astonishing to see. I can remember seeing him at a Nottingham miners’ benefit, watching him play Between the Wars, and never has a song resonated with a room full of people like that, I can assure you.”

Jupitus has known Bragg since March 1984. The song he mentions was an incongruous top-20 hit in 1985: a hymn to the human hopes that were met by the postwar social settlement, but were then being crushed by the Thatcher government. It led its author on to Top of the Pops, where he gave a performance you can find on YouTube. Amid the disco lights, Bragg plays the song, accompanied only by his electric guitar. Up until that point no high-profile musician had ever tried this combination: solo performance was always synonymous with acoustic instruments, so in terms of medium as much as message, Bragg was doing something new.

Bragg began his musical progress in the slipstream of punk, in a short-lived band called Riff-Raff. A mixture of boredom and a moment of revelation sparked by The Jam’s 1979 song Little Boy Soldiers, led him to join the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, where he learned to drive a tank, before buying himself out for £175. He became a solo performer, and styled himself as “a one-man punk revival”. Soon, though, Bragg came to realise that his music also aligned him with the folk tradition, and influences he had first heard in the music of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.

And all the time, the split between love and politics was reflected in both the songs and the crowds who came to see him. “My audience was made up of people who came for the politics, and other people who came for the love songs,” he later reflected. “There was a militant tendency and a softie tendency. But I’m both of those myself.”

To an extent, he says, some of this still holds. “There are people who really feel that I should be singing political songs and nothing else,” he says. “I do have to deal with people who feel very strongly about that, and that if I deviate from it, then I’m somehow selling out … But my politics are really an ideological sort of manifestation of my humanitarian beliefs. So the overlap between the two things is always there.”

Bragg’s 30-year career has been punctuated by three noticeable pauses. After releasing Don’t Try This at Home in 1991, he became a father – his son, Jack, is now 19 – and did not release a record for five years. He recalled wondering: “What do songs written by Billy Bragg, someone’s dad, sound like?” He broke his silence with the 1996 album William Bloke, and then entered one of the most fertile phases of his progress.

Custodians of Woody Guthrie’s legacy chose him to put rediscovered lyrics by that icon of the American left to new music, in collaboration with the band Wilco. The project – which led to two albums titled Mermaid Avenue, named after a Coney Island street where Guthrie had lived – underlined the centrality of human relationships to Bragg’s aesthetic.

In musical terms at least, Bragg paused again between 2003 and 2008, when he wrote The Progressive Patriot, a book that mixed memoir with his thoughts about English identity and nationhood, and the risks bound up with the left’s refusal to engage with such subjects. During this time, it also became apparent that he had transcended music’s interminable cycles of fashion, amassing an unshakeable following and becoming a touchstone for plenty of new musicians.

Bragg’s latest period of stock-taking was partly sparked by the death of his mother, Marie. “My dad passed away 36 years ago,” he says. “So with my mum passing, suddenly I’m in the front rank, I’m the oldest in the family. When you lose a parent, you can’t help but look around and think: ‘What am I doing? Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Am I wasting my time?’

“I wouldn’t say this new record is about that experience, but it became the means by which I was able to move on, after mum passed away. In that void, after me and my brother had sorted everything out, and put everything away, there was a time there when I was wondering what I was doing with my life. You think about all those things when you lose someone close. And ringing up [the album's producer] Joe Henry was the beginning of a process.”

Tooth & Nail has been well received by the critics, and just entered the UK albums chart at No 13, a placing that puts it in the same rarefied orbit as his most successful albums. It confirms that he has managed something only achieved by a select group of musicians and songwriters: moving through life along with his core audience – and with all those songs about love and loss, creating a soundtrack to thousands of lives.

“It’s much easier for a solo artist to grow older,” says Jupitus. “With groups, the ageing process is amplified: ‘That one’s ageing well, but hasn’t that one got fat?’ But Billy is ageing very gracefully – because individuals grow old, and we grow old with them.”

Singer, songwriter, activist

Born 20 December 1957 in Barking, Essex, as Stephen William Bragg.

Career to date Released debut mini-album, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy, in 1983, and has subsequently completed 12 more, excluding anthologies and compilations.

High point Writing and recording the single We Laughed, recorded with three women at the Trimar hospice in Weymouth as part of a project aimed at giving a voice to people with long-term and terminal illnesses. It reached No 11. “If you’re talking about something that I’m proud I did,” he says, “I would put that at the top of the list.”

Low point: The Conservative victory of 1992. “They were still able to win with this guy who tucked his shirt in his pants, and [Neil] Kinnock still went down to defeat,” he says now. “That election really was a sea-change: worse than 1987, in terms of how it felt.”

What he says: “They very often ask me, how would you like to be introduced? And I say: ‘Singer-songwriter and activist.’”

What others say “I bought his early albums and totally fell in love with them. It’s important for pop to tell the stories of real people’s lives. And Billy’s so honest. He’s never compromised.” Richard Archer, vocalist, Hard-Fi

From agitpop to love songs, Bragg has brought his audience through life with him, creating a soundtrack to thousands of lives

Billy Bragg has a new beard, a mixture of grey and what he calls “sandy coloured: a bit grey, and a bit red”. When he grew it, he says, “everyone said it suited me”. It also chimes with an element of his past. “When I was forging my career as a solo artist, I dyed my hair blond, so I when I looked in the mirror in the morning, I looked like someone else. And I felt like somebody else. It didn’t last, and I don’t expect the beard will last forever. But again, I feel like I’ve passed through a change.”

His new album is titled Tooth & Nail, and it has its own strapline, taken from a tweet by a fan who listened to his music while recovering from a broken relationship. She called him “The Sherpa of Heartbreak”.

“It reminded me that I write love songs, and I shouldn’t make any bones about it,” he explains, down a phone line from a tour stop-off in Mesa, Arizona. “When I was thinking about making this album, the songs I had were predominantly more personal.

“And rather than think: ‘I’d better write some political songs to balance it up’, I followed that instinct.”

In terms of its pre-eminent place in his recorded work, the subject of love is arguably Bragg’s true metier. His media caricature is that of the ultimate “leftwing singer-songwriter”, forever penning protest music. But it is his love songs that have most endured and which arguably give the truest picture of the man: a 55-year-old native of Barking, on the Essex/London borders, whose biography includes no end of stuff that sets him apart from the rock herd – not least, a brief spell in the army – and whose music always returns to the elemental stuff of human relationships.

He has long had a talent for lovelorn melancholy, heard in such songs as St Swithin’s Day (1984), which has the distinction of containing what is probably the rock canon’s only poetic reference to masturbation: “With my own hands/ When I make love to your memory.”

His new album is smattered with lyrics that unpick the more complex, ambivalent aspects of love: a glimpse of remorse and the pain of absence in a song called Swallow My Pride, and Chasing Rainbows, a wearied admission of the inevitability of tension and discord in even the most solid pairings. And his lyrics have also examined aspects of life that too many songwriters leave untouched: the almost impossibly moving Tank Park Salute (1991) is an evocation of bereavement based on the death of his father when Bragg was 18.

The ex-Smiths guitarist and songwriter Johnny Marr first met Bragg in the early 1980s, when the latter was becoming a byword for the politicised music briefly known as “agit-pop”.

“His agenda and his music, like a lot of great people, seemed to be all in the same package,” says Marr. “You got that straight away. But it was only when I started to hear him play a full set that I discovered all the romanticism in his writing, and that he wrote great love songs too. I’d just assumed everything was political. But he wrote a lot about falling in love: he’d obviously fallen in love a few times, and it had hit him hard.”

By way of a reference point, Marr mentions Tamla Motown icon Smokey Robinson, whose music Bragg adores. “It’s a funny one with Billy,” he goes on. “He’s such a masculine guy, but he’s able to tap into a lovely poignancy and vulnerability – which I’ve got to see over the years, being his friend.”

For comedian and radio voice Phill Jupitus, things worked the other way round. Having grown up in Essex, he first fell for Bragg’s love songs, and felt their impact all the more because of the author’s familiar vowel sounds. “The soul singers – Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding – sing about pain and suffering,” he says. And you understand the words they’re expressing it with. But this was an accent from 15 miles down the road, which really spoke to me.

“What actually surprised me was the politics. During the miners’ strike, seeing him speak to people … when he spoke to a room in such a clear and defined way, it was astonishing to see. I can remember seeing him at a Nottingham miners’ benefit, watching him play Between the Wars, and never has a song resonated with a room full of people like that, I can assure you.”

Jupitus has known Bragg since March 1984. The song he mentions was an incongruous top-20 hit in 1985: a hymn to the human hopes that were met by the postwar social settlement, but were then being crushed by the Thatcher government. It led its author on to Top of the Pops, where he gave a performance you can find on YouTube. Amid the disco lights, Bragg plays the song, accompanied only by his electric guitar. Up until that point no high-profile musician had ever tried this combination: solo performance was always synonymous with acoustic instruments, so in terms of medium as much as message, Bragg was doing something new.

Bragg began his musical progress in the slipstream of punk, in a short-lived band called Riff-Raff. A mixture of boredom and a moment of revelation sparked by The Jam’s 1979 song Little Boy Soldiers, led him to join the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, where he learned to drive a tank, before buying himself out for £175. He became a solo performer, and styled himself as “a one-man punk revival”. Soon, though, Bragg came to realise that his music also aligned him with the folk tradition, and influences he had first heard in the music of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.

And all the time, the split between love and politics was reflected in both the songs and the crowds who came to see him. “My audience was made up of people who came for the politics, and other people who came for the love songs,” he later reflected. “There was a militant tendency and a softie tendency. But I’m both of those myself.”

To an extent, he says, some of this still holds. “There are people who really feel that I should be singing political songs and nothing else,” he says. “I do have to deal with people who feel very strongly about that, and that if I deviate from it, then I’m somehow selling out … But my politics are really an ideological sort of manifestation of my humanitarian beliefs. So the overlap between the two things is always there.”

Bragg’s 30-year career has been punctuated by three noticeable pauses. After releasing Don’t Try This at Home in 1991, he became a father – his son, Jack, is now 19 – and did not release a record for five years. He recalled wondering: “What do songs written by Billy Bragg, someone’s dad, sound like?” He broke his silence with the 1996 album William Bloke, and then entered one of the most fertile phases of his progress.

Custodians of Woody Guthrie’s legacy chose him to put rediscovered lyrics by that icon of the American left to new music, in collaboration with the band Wilco. The project – which led to two albums titled Mermaid Avenue, named after a Coney Island street where Guthrie had lived – underlined the centrality of human relationships to Bragg’s aesthetic.

In musical terms at least, Bragg paused again between 2003 and 2008, when he wrote The Progressive Patriot, a book that mixed memoir with his thoughts about English identity and nationhood, and the risks bound up with the left’s refusal to engage with such subjects. During this time, it also became apparent that he had transcended music’s interminable cycles of fashion, amassing an unshakeable following and becoming a touchstone for plenty of new musicians.

Bragg’s latest period of stock-taking was partly sparked by the death of his mother, Marie. “My dad passed away 36 years ago,” he says. “So with my mum passing, suddenly I’m in the front rank, I’m the oldest in the family. When you lose a parent, you can’t help but look around and think: ‘What am I doing? Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Am I wasting my time?’

“I wouldn’t say this new record is about that experience, but it became the means by which I was able to move on, after mum passed away. In that void, after me and my brother had sorted everything out, and put everything away, there was a time there when I was wondering what I was doing with my life. You think about all those things when you lose someone close. And ringing up [the album's producer] Joe Henry was the beginning of a process.”

Tooth & Nail has been well received by the critics, and just entered the UK albums chart at No 13, a placing that puts it in the same rarefied orbit as his most successful albums. It confirms that he has managed something only achieved by a select group of musicians and songwriters: moving through life along with his core audience – and with all those songs about love and loss, creating a soundtrack to thousands of lives.

“It’s much easier for a solo artist to grow older,” says Jupitus. “With groups, the ageing process is amplified: ‘That one’s ageing well, but hasn’t that one got fat?’ But Billy is ageing very gracefully – because individuals grow old, and we grow old with them.”

Singer, songwriter, activist

Born 20 December 1957 in Barking, Essex, as Stephen William Bragg.

Career to date Released debut mini-album, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy, in 1983, and has subsequently completed 12 more, excluding anthologies and compilations.

High point Writing and recording the single We Laughed, recorded with three women at the Trimar hospice in Weymouth as part of a project aimed at giving a voice to people with long-term and terminal illnesses. It reached No 11. “If you’re talking about something that I’m proud I did,” he says, “I would put that at the top of the list.”

Low point: The Conservative victory of 1992. “They were still able to win with this guy who tucked his shirt in his pants, and [Neil] Kinnock still went down to defeat,” he says now. “That election really was a sea-change: worse than 1987, in terms of how it felt.”

What he says: “They very often ask me, how would you like to be introduced? And I say: ‘Singer-songwriter and activist.’”

What others say “I bought his early albums and totally fell in love with them. It’s important for pop to tell the stories of real people’s lives. And Billy’s so honest. He’s never compromised.” Richard Archer, vocalist, Hard-Fi